Proxmox recommends to not install anything directly on the proxmox host/baremetal.

Personally I would set this up as:

Proxmox installed on whatever single disk or raid 1 array.

Create a TrueNAS(or whatever OS you want) VM inside Proxmox. Mount the rest of the drives directly to the TrueNAS VM via Proxmox’s interface.

In the TrueNAS VM take the drives that were mounted directly to it and setup your array and pool(s) to your preference.

Now, I’d say you have two paths from this point:

• Inside the TrueNAS VM use their tools to create a VM within TrueNAS and use that for your arr stack.

OR

• Go back to Proxmox and create another VM or container and setup your arr stack in that container and point it to your TrueNAS via network mounts using internal networking from within proxmox(virtual bridge with a virtual LAN).

Either option has pros and cons. Doing everything inside TrueNAS will be a bit more simple, but you do complicate your TrueNAS setup and you’re at the mercy of how TrueNAS manages VMs(backups, restores, etc.). On the reverse with Proxmox, setting up the vmbridge and doing the network mounts is more work initially, but keeping the arr stack in a Proxmox VM/container lets you do direct snapshots and backups of the arr stack, and if you ever need to rebuild it or change it to another arr style set of tools then you can blow away the Proxmox VM and start fresh and resetup the network mounts.

Or don’t do any of the above and just install TrueNAS on the box directly as the baremetal OS and do everything inside TrueNAS.

0 bytes free is a broken environment. So that requires a fix during moratorium IMO.

Mint 21 still has support until 2027, so not exactly needed…but I get it when you only see certain family members during specific times of the year.

I’m just saying doing a full migration from ESXI to Proxmox and having to backup all VMs and import them or recreate and doing this during the holidays…I’d rather just sit on the couch and enjoy family time than be stuck in my garage or glued to my laptop.

Upgrading a family member’s laptop while shooting the shit with everyone while drinking a beer or something is just fine. Don’t need 100% focus, you’re good there man.

At work we have a nearly 2 week moratorium that covers Christmas and New Years. We do zero changes unless something breaks on its own. So everyone can take time off without worrying too much.

So I do the same for my homelab. I’ll spin up new stuff for fun(new docker containers to try out new apps), but I don’t touch my stable stuff. No reboots, no updates, no image pulls, nothing.

I’m as much of a nerd as the next guy, but hanging out with my HOA president? Probably the second to last thing I would ever want to do on this planet, and the last being living in a HOA.

No one is going to be interested in…whatever you’re trying to setup. Sorry buddy

I do this as well. Though if I’m deploying a stack(grafana+prometheus+cadvisor) then it all goes under a single folder like /opt/stackname/

But if I’m running multiple services that are mostly separate or not in the same stack then they go in their own folders like /opt/nginx/ and /opt/grafana/

Yes, essentially I have:

Proxmox Baremetal
    ↪LXC1
        ↪Docker Container1
    ↪LXC2
        ↪Docker Container2
    ↪LXC3
        ↪Docker Container 3

Or using real services:

Proxmox Baremetal
    ↪Ubuntu LXC1 192.168.1.11
        ↪Docker Stack ("Profana")
            ↪cadvisor
              grafana
              node_exporter
              prometheus
    ↪Ubuntu LXC2 192.168.1.12
        ↪Docker Stack ("paperless-ngx")
            ↪paperless-ngx-webserver-1
              apache/tika
              gotenberg
              postgresdb
              redis
    ↪Ubuntu LXC3 192.168.1.13
        ↪Docker Stack ("teamspeak")
            ↪teamspeak
              mariadb

I do have a AMP game server, which AMP is installed in the Ubuntu container directly, but AMP uses docker to create the game servers.

Doing it this way(individual Ubuntu containers with docker installed on each) allows me to stop and start individual services, take backups via proxmox, restore from backups, and also manage things a bit more directly with IP assignment.

I also have pfSense installed as a full VM on my Proxmox and pfSense handles all of my firewall rules and SSL cert management/renewals. So none of my ubuntu/docker containers need to configure SSL services, pfSense just does SSL offloading and injects my SSL certs as requests come in.

I have an old Windows laptop. I need to figure out how to do dual boot with Linux

For this I would recommend:

1. Install Windows first
2. In Windows, partition the disk drive to how much storage you want. So if you have a 1TB, then maybe do 500GB for Windows and 500GB for Linux? Leave the new partition as unformatted/unallocated
3. Boot up your linux installer and select the unformatted/unallocated partition for Linux to install to. Don’t erase whole disk. But let Linux setup all of it’s own formatting and partitions on the empty space

Now why do it this way? Because Windows does NOT like the boot manager being replaced and does NOT like disk space go “missing” unless it allocates it itself. If you install Windows first it’ll setup the boot manager for Windows and then when you install Linux grub will get installed and that can manage Windows pretty well.

And if you let Windows partition off the blank space for Linux then Windows knows that that empty partition isn’t owned by Windows anymore and it won’t freak out seeing the space go missing when Linux takes it over.

This article covers most: https://linuxblog.io/dual-boot-linux-windows-install-guide/

If you have two individual disk drives then I would do the same thing, install Windows on one of the drives, boot into Windows, and make sure the second drive shows up in disk utility, but it isn’t formatted for use in Windows, just unallocated/blank. Then when you install Linux you just tell it to install onto the second drive.

and get my vpn sorted (again) so he can use VMs on my Proxmox box

I would 100% recommend Tailscale for this. You can install Tailscale on the Proxmox host and then have your nephew have his own Tailscale account where you can give him access to only the Proxmox box.

I do this with my Proxmox boxes so I can remotely manage them wherever I am. When you first install Tailscale on Proxmox it may require a reboot, so I would recommend being nearby the server so you can login physically if needed, but after it has been smooth sailing for me. Been using it like this for a year or two now.

Of course just a suggestion.

I don’t have any books in particular to recommend, but with homelab’ing we should be learning about the command line of our OS(Powershell, terminal(bash, zsh)).

Learning the ins and outs of something like bash, cron, environment variables, for loops, systemd services(managing, creating your own), command line networking…all things I’ve had to learn to either setup, manage, and/or troubleshoot my homelab.

So maybe basic Linux command line books? Probably O’Reilly has some along with bash.

This is pretty much my setup as well. Proxmox on bare metal, then everything I do are in Ubuntu LXC containers, which have docker installed inside each of them running whatever docker stack.

I just installed Portainer and got the standalone agents installed on each LXC container, so it’s helped massively with managing each docker setup.

Of course you can do whatever base image you want for the LXC container, I just prefer Ubuntu for my homelab.

I do need to setup a golden image though to make stand-ups easier…one thing at a time though!

While I love and run Grafana and Prometheus myself, it’s like taking a RPG to an ant.

There are simpler tools that do the job just fine of “is X broken?”.

Even just running Portainer and attaching it to a bunch of standalone Docker environments is pretty good too.

I run proxmox for my own homelab and another instance for very small services inside my LAN.

Anyway, I have gotten into docker recently and my method so far has been to spin up a LXC container of just a base OS(like Ubuntu or Alpine or whatever) and then install docker and whatever else inside that container and then run my service.

So I have one container per service. Now my problem is how to manage the docker side without having to go into each container individually. I have tried portainer but it’s not clicking with me.

I’ve actually been trying to find a solution to just have docker on a bare metal OS install and that be my hypervisor, but I can’t get a clear answer on anything, so Proxmox seems to be my only option.

Proxmox is a very solid option, but it is not “less intensive” than Debian since it is built on top of Debian. Proxmox does not install a desktop environment(it has a web GUI), so that may help with keeping resources low, but it isn’t some magical solution.

I would recommend trying it 100%, there is a little bit of a learning curve getting to know Proxmox, but it’s the best hypervisor I’ve used for homelab so far.

Your situation sounds like a two server solution for local. So one server for hypervisor/vms and then snapshots and backups go to a separate box like a NAS. As for “house burning down”, a solution for that is off-site backups. I’m guessing building a small TrueNAS server and installing it at a friend’s house or your parents or whatever and then find a backup solution to sync(syncthing may be an answer here for you?).

I don’t care about my homelab much, but I do care about my family photos. For that I follow my own 3-2-1 where:

3 copies of my data

2 copies are local

1 copy is off-site

I have a NAS at my house and another NAS at my parents house. They are both linked with syncthing and I do a one-way backup to the other NAS. Now, my parents are a 10 minutes away by car, so I consider that NAS “local”.

And then I backup my NAS to backblaze for my off-site backup.

I like Bit warden for someone like my mom, but I have my keepass setup with sync thing and 2fa and I’m beyond happy with that. Simple and effective.

I showed interest at around this age and my dad showed me CentOS and building basic webpages. I didn’t take too much interest in that, but I asked him if we could build a Counter Strike server and he obliged. He’s a nerd himself so we had a static IP for the server and everything. Worked well!

Anyway, I would recommend getting an old desktop and installing Ubuntu server or desktop edition with a desktop environment. Show him how to navigate the command line and what that means if you follow the file explorer at the same time. And then hosting very basic things(webpages, local game servers, etc.).

He might really latch onto it, or might not be interested whatsoever. I latched onto it, ended up building my own PCs soon after, and have my own homelab and I work as a full time Linux sysadmin now.